The 26 pin connector is for the Matrox Rainbow Runner Studio, an add-on board that provided video capture and stuff; it connected to the Millennium via those pin headers you thought were for RAM expansion, and came with a breakout cable that attached to the 26 pin connector that had video inputs etc. on the other end. Matrox still offers the manual and drivers for download which is pretty amazing after all these years!
The Rainbow Runner was for the Mystique. Pretty sure it was called Media XL for the Millenium. Both used the RAM expansion pin headers plus additional pins on the card. You had either the RAM expansion or the video capture/MPEG 1 hardware acceleration card. The connector on the back is for Video in and Audio in and out. The Mystique had an cable whip the with connectors while the Millienum had an L shaped box for that.
When I was 13 my dad bought a used Vectra VL in the exact same case, except it was a Pentium 133 to start with. The first upgrade was to a Pentium 166 (non mmx) and I messed with the dip switches toward at the top of the board to overclock it to 200. Over time we upgraded it to a full 128 mb of ram and added 2 more hard drives, one with the help of a 5.25 adapter set up as secondary to an upgraded 10x *HP* branded/colored CD burner. Started with Win98 SE, ended with Win2k. It truly was a beast and I had so much fun watching this video. Thanks.
Nice to see a new video from you welcome back. Love the HP vectras My father and I had fun tearing apart an old Pentium II model one we found behind an old dentist office in the trash. They didn't even bother to destroy or get rid of the hard drive before throwing it away. Always loved them towers though due to their unique inverted like design.
It was nice to see you again. Thank you for your effort to retrieved the granny recipe. Halfway through the video, I was really hoping to see the recipe, and when u finally opened it, the satisfaction was amazing. Hahahaha HNY! 🎉🎉
Thanks. Glad to be back! These releases make my weekends so much better. I'm doing fine, just extremely low on available time and energy for things such as this. I'm kind of a big deal at work (senior DevOps eng) and that's where my focus has been. The holidays are our peak season.
@@miketech1024 hah. oh man i hear you. glad you are doing well. sorry you dont have time for you. don't worry about us. you do you. i'm a tier 4 server admin where i work my team (3 of us) do advanced troubleshooting on servers, active directory and azure. my company has about 42,000 people and about 5000 servers azure, on prem, both linux and windows.
Glad you're back. Love your style of touring through the systems. Very entertaining and I've learnt a lot from your videos :-) looking forward to going through the fourth pc haul.
Hey. Good to see you back. I love these unorthodox systems from the '90s where they (as in, OEMs like HP, Dell, Compaq) were still figuring things out about how to build a computer. Too bad everything is the same nowadays, but I guess that's inevitable.
I love the days when systems had just two fans, including power supply. Different times! Also, HP meaning quality is such a novel idea in 2025. I also hate Molex connectors.
Best I found is they DA-26 connector was a high density video card connector (and i've found a few places that show that being used for like a CNC machine? but probably not here) weird one edit: this is a SUPER exciting machine.. I'm SO glad you took the time to share this one from the haul so far! I am almost positive they had a tower exactly like this at the township where my mom worked (she was payroll clerk then moved up to CFO later, but I grew up with her working there so I was their in-house tech support for years as a kid) they had some SUN systems they did the payroll on, but I am POSITIVE there was an HP Vectra there.. I'm going to look at the old photos of her work this weekend!! : )
7:19 The symbol on the end of the Matrox card is also on the PCB. It was also in the same places on a Matrox Mystique I had years back, it's just a logo of sorts and they stamp it on the slot cover as a little flair.
Glad to have you back! Happy New Year 2025! Nice video btw. Brings back memories of my days working at the Puerto Rico Chess Federation, they had some of those workstations in the facilities. Back then, they were built like tanks, very reliable stuff HP put together. Now, stuff are disposable. Stay safe and God bless.
Seems like Grandma's chocolate cookie recipe is a booby trap lol. YAY you got Grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe at last lol! I love your videos they make my day! Can't wait to see what other videos you have in store. I just have one request, never post my chocolate chip cookie or any of this Grandma's cookie recipes lol! Glad to have you back!!
Back in 2013 I worked at a Kmart and the store had two of these for the pos servers. One of them was apparently broken or taken out of service just left sitting on the floor unhooked. In its place was a more modern dell Optiplex desktop running windows 7 enterprise. With some VM software running the ibm pos software. I do know that if the hp was off then the sale items would not ring up properly. If the dell was off then the credit card readers wouldn’t work on the registers. If the ibm was off then the pod registers wouldn’t boot at all. I was blown away with how old the equipment was and how any random employee could have full access to the systems because none of them had any sort of passwords or were set to log out to a Lock Screen. The stores main server was some old IBM machine.
@35:10, wow that's nuts! I have my Chessmaster 5000 CD still here, I remember that old Mindscape logo and the game. Was a ton of fun to play, I love chess, so it killed hours of my time.
Interesting to see that this is pretty much the same machine with a different front panel as an HP NetServer E30. My E30 has a non-MMX Pentium 166 and integrated S3 VGA. I really like this machine. It is quiet, and very reliable.
Definitely gotta save the cookie recipe. Boy, the hard drive is definitely crying to be put on its misery, old computers definitely an interesting journey down memory lane on older machines.
Definitely a Hal 9000 vibe! Glad to have you back I've certainly missed your videos. Curious, did you ever check out that NIC to see if it runs both ports independently/simultaneously? Quite an interesting rig though to be sure, but at least you saved Granny's cookies!
When you said, "that's that HP quality, or HP quality as it used to be" that's exactly what I was thinking the whole video. I have an HP 32 volt bench power supply and a 12c calculator, both Made in USA, and the quality is incredible. Likewise, my Keysight DMM from 2018 is also high quality. HP used to make their PCs in that mold. Just, not anymore.
That cd rom color mismatch was original,i had a VL 400 and it had the same color scheme. Being grey from the factory helped it not get yellow at least :)
I rolled out a bunch of these systems to a trading floor back in the day. They were NT 3.51 systems with additional software to make the user interface resemble and work like NT 4.0. There's a "matching" server from the same era, give or take. It's a large, on wheels, Pentium Pro machine. We had a couple of them at another job. They ran NT 4, SNA Server, etc. Also, please keep your eyes open for a bunch of Digital servers in the HX series. Intel machines. Yet more personal experience with those. Enjoy your videos. Cheers!
I'm pretty sure I know exactly which server body you're talking about and it's one of the few time my dad told me "no" on bringing a system home that was on the side of the road.
This will make an excellent donor for parts to rescue other machines that don't suffer from proprietar-itis. Fireball gonna fireball. Also... you're into cars? MikeCar channel in the works???
i got some files off a pc from 1998 that my grandparents had. Connected the drive to my pc and the thing did not want to work. I banged it around a bunch and got one read of the files. You can tell i'm missing all of the system files and everything but I got the documents folder and that is all I needed. There is something oddly eerie about dying hard drives to me. I wish I had more time to explore it, but now whenever I get it to register on my pc at all it crashes windows entirely. It is dead dead.
I have not seen one in a few years and the last one came in was beat up desktop. The keyboard for those if they still mfg. that style was really retro with hp logo and red keys. As for usb. The reason many don't remember it was really wasn't use until windows 98. Even though they did have windows 95 usb edition Several devices required Windows 98. Plus several boards had headers but no connectors. compared to say I think All PII machines. To many years ago.
I well remember those crunchy Fireball drives. Sounded like paper tearing. They were fine in my experience. I wonder if this machine has an administrative LAN connection for remote maintenance?
That Disney program was actually pretty good. Whoever had it. Did the etch picture of the family very well. One day. You'll have to go into the temporary internet files. You may end up blurring half the video. I never needed Napster. When there was a copy saved in my temp internet files of music I liked. I noticed you changed shirts somewhere while making the video. What did I miss?
Did you ever find anything about that NIC? I've never seen that and I was working in IT when the change was happening. I guess there were times when the auto negotiate process wouldn't work right, but you could just set what you wanted with a utility.
that is a pretty neat find. even tho i was a bit disappointined. seeing it be a vectra with that case i was expecting it to be a pentium pro. but seems like hp also used the same cases for socket 7. would be even more cool if they had used a quantum big foot drive in it
Leave it up to HP to redesign EVERYTHING that is otherwise commonplace! No wonder they eventually bought Compaq too, two peas in a pod. My HP Vectra QS/16S 80386-16 system had a CPU card that plugged into the motherboard. I wonder how many other HP Vectras used these unconventional motherboards and power supplies.
Easy to have survivorship bias with hard drives. As you said those that would fail have already failed, and I believe there's good number of short lived HDDs against every surviving one. the ratio would be the truth to the matter, though that's impossible to determine.
Unfortunately pretty much all Quantum Fireballs are dying or dead. There’s a rubber piece as part of the head mechanism that turns to goo. Best case, it’s still solid enough that it just struggles a bit. Worst case, you get a head crash. It sucks, kinda made extra bad because Apple were a big user of them (and I’m sad I’ll never be able to recover my childhood Pentium Win98 install because of it), but at least yours seems to be hanging in there. The WordPad crash was in the Word document converter module, maybe that dll or the doc itself is corrupt. Proper Office/LibreOffice have always been a lot better than WordPad at handling corrupt files.
I really hope you're somehow able to recover that chocolate chip cookie recipe and then make the cookies and then send them to me 🙂 Edit at the end of viewing: one step down, two to go!
Try Googling the word “joke.” It will help your life substantially Also, if you have to use the phrase “sorry to be that guy” it means whatever you just said or are about to say just shouldn’t be said.
The 26 pin connector is for the Matrox Rainbow Runner Studio, an add-on board that provided video capture and stuff; it connected to the Millennium via those pin headers you thought were for RAM expansion, and came with a breakout cable that attached to the 26 pin connector that had video inputs etc. on the other end. Matrox still offers the manual and drivers for download which is pretty amazing after all these years!
i have a matrox mystique with that extra card
The Rainbow Runner was for the Mystique. Pretty sure it was called Media XL for the Millenium. Both used the RAM expansion pin headers plus additional pins on the card. You had either the RAM expansion or the video capture/MPEG 1 hardware acceleration card. The connector on the back is for Video in and Audio in and out. The Mystique had an cable whip the with connectors while the Millienum had an L shaped box for that.
If I remember correctly. Its svideo in and out and composite in and out too
Matrox Media XL MPEG for MGA Millenium
I used Google Lens and came up with roughly the same thing... The Retro Web have it too with 4 drivers available. win 3.1x,9x,nt3.5x and nt4.0
When I was 13 my dad bought a used Vectra VL in the exact same case, except it was a Pentium 133 to start with. The first upgrade was to a Pentium 166 (non mmx) and I messed with the dip switches toward at the top of the board to overclock it to 200. Over time we upgraded it to a full 128 mb of ram and added 2 more hard drives, one with the help of a 5.25 adapter set up as secondary to an upgraded 10x *HP* branded/colored CD burner. Started with Win98 SE, ended with Win2k. It truly was a beast and I had so much fun watching this video. Thanks.
The saga to save granny's cookies, and they end up being a bog standard recipe, still worth it.
Welcome back, beautiful ☺❤
Nice to see a new video from you welcome back. Love the HP vectras My father and I had fun tearing apart an old Pentium II model one we found behind an old dentist office in the trash. They didn't even bother to destroy or get rid of the hard drive before throwing it away. Always loved them towers though due to their unique inverted like design.
It was nice to see you again. Thank you for your effort to retrieved the granny recipe. Halfway through the video, I was really hoping to see the recipe, and when u finally opened it, the satisfaction was amazing. Hahahaha HNY! 🎉🎉
Always love watching your videos.
They're like comfort food for the eyes and soul.
Nice to see you back Mike. Hope everything is good with you.
Thanks. Glad to be back! These releases make my weekends so much better. I'm doing fine, just extremely low on available time and energy for things such as this. I'm kind of a big deal at work (senior DevOps eng) and that's where my focus has been. The holidays are our peak season.
@@miketech1024 hah. oh man i hear you. glad you are doing well. sorry you dont have time for you. don't worry about us. you do you. i'm a tier 4 server admin where i work my team (3 of us) do advanced troubleshooting on servers, active directory and azure. my company has about 42,000 people and about 5000 servers azure, on prem, both linux and windows.
@@miketech1024I know precisely how that feels. We moved the contents of our data center last week! 😮
@@richjamjamThat's why I love holiday code freezes, basically free vacations
Glad to have you back! Was well worth the wait!
Glad you're back. Love your style of touring through the systems. Very entertaining and I've learnt a lot from your videos :-) looking forward to going through the fourth pc haul.
Thanks Mike, this is what I was missing in 2025, I now feel somewhat rejevenated! 😁
Hey Mike you're soo close to 20k subscribers
Yay he's back! ❤️
After 2 months, another miketech video to fall asleep to
Nice to see you back mate. Another great video. Thanks for sharing 😁
You're back! Hell Yeah!
Hey. Good to see you back. I love these unorthodox systems from the '90s where they (as in, OEMs like HP, Dell, Compaq) were still figuring things out about how to build a computer. Too bad everything is the same nowadays, but I guess that's inevitable.
I love the days when systems had just two fans, including power supply. Different times! Also, HP meaning quality is such a novel idea in 2025. I also hate Molex connectors.
Wszystkiego Najlepszego w Nowym Roku , Mike 🤝👍👋
I really enjoy your videos, takes me back!
Best I found is they DA-26 connector was a high density video card connector (and i've found a few places that show that being used for like a CNC machine? but probably not here) weird one
edit: this is a SUPER exciting machine.. I'm SO glad you took the time to share this one from the haul so far! I am almost positive they had a tower exactly like this at the township where my mom worked (she was payroll clerk then moved up to CFO later, but I grew up with her working there so I was their in-house tech support for years as a kid) they had some SUN systems they did the payroll on, but I am POSITIVE there was an HP Vectra there.. I'm going to look at the old photos of her work this weekend!! : )
A member on Patreon has found the answer. It's for a breakout cable that is used by some of the daughterboards: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=71161
7:19 The symbol on the end of the Matrox card is also on the PCB. It was also in the same places on a Matrox Mystique I had years back, it's just a logo of sorts and they stamp it on the slot cover as a little flair.
Thanks for saving granny's cookies and of course that old computer!
Hell yeah new Mike video!
He lives! Welcome back.
HE'S RETURNED!
I am so happy to see a new upload from you, i love your videos!
Its been 2 months and damn I'm glad to see this vid is 45 minutes
Welcome back Mike, great to see you on UA-cam again
Glad to have you back! Happy New Year 2025! Nice video btw. Brings back memories of my days working at the Puerto Rico Chess Federation, they had some of those workstations in the facilities. Back then, they were built like tanks, very reliable stuff HP put together. Now, stuff are disposable. Stay safe and God bless.
Nice to see you back. Regards from Brazil!
Have not seen ya for a minute! GTSY once again. I see MikeTech I click MikeTech! My Tech brother from another Mother! 🙂😃
9:17 meow :D
hi pal im glad you are back i think you are the best computer guy on hear! you make my vids look silly lol
I'm so glad you're back!
Good to see you are back.
hey hey!! happy to see u!!!
neat system :3
love watching how u work on themm.
looking forward to this next ewaste haul!!
That was quite an adventure (of recovering granny's cookie recipe). After many hardships the quest was finally concluded with a happy ending. :)
That combined LED/power switch is pretty damn cool. Wouldn't mind to have something similar in modern cases.
Welcome back!
Now you gotta make those cookies!
Seems like Grandma's chocolate cookie recipe is a booby trap lol. YAY you got Grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe at last lol! I love your videos they make my day! Can't wait to see what other videos you have in store. I just have one request, never post my chocolate chip cookie or any of this Grandma's cookie recipes lol! Glad to have you back!!
Back in 2013 I worked at a Kmart and the store had two of these for the pos servers. One of them was apparently broken or taken out of service just left sitting on the floor unhooked. In its place was a more modern dell Optiplex desktop running windows 7 enterprise. With some VM software running the ibm pos software. I do know that if the hp was off then the sale items would not ring up properly. If the dell was off then the credit card readers wouldn’t work on the registers. If the ibm was off then the pod registers wouldn’t boot at all. I was blown away with how old the equipment was and how any random employee could have full access to the systems because none of them had any sort of passwords or were set to log out to a Lock Screen. The stores main server was some old IBM machine.
Hello, welcome back 😊
I'm so happy Granny's recipe has been saved
@35:10, wow that's nuts! I have my Chessmaster 5000 CD still here, I remember that old Mindscape logo and the game. Was a ton of fun to play, I love chess, so it killed hours of my time.
The connector on the card is for the breakout cable to the Rainbow Runner Studio card, Matrox's a/v capture and mpeg decoder.
Interesting to see that this is pretty much the same machine with a different front panel as an HP NetServer E30. My E30 has a non-MMX Pentium 166 and integrated S3 VGA. I really like this machine. It is quiet, and very reliable.
nice video bro!
You're back ❤
Definitely gotta save the cookie recipe. Boy, the hard drive is definitely crying to be put on its misery, old computers definitely an interesting journey down memory lane on older machines.
Definitely a Hal 9000 vibe! Glad to have you back I've certainly missed your videos.
Curious, did you ever check out that NIC to see if it runs both ports independently/simultaneously? Quite an interesting rig though to be sure, but at least you saved Granny's cookies!
When you said, "that's that HP quality, or HP quality as it used to be" that's exactly what I was thinking the whole video. I have an HP 32 volt bench power supply and a 12c calculator, both Made in USA, and the quality is incredible. Likewise, my Keysight DMM from 2018 is also high quality. HP used to make their PCs in that mold. Just, not anymore.
Yay it's Mike
That cd rom color mismatch was original,i had a VL 400 and it had the same color scheme. Being grey from the factory helped it not get yellow at least :)
I rolled out a bunch of these systems to a trading floor back in the day. They were NT 3.51 systems with additional software to make the user interface resemble and work like NT 4.0.
There's a "matching" server from the same era, give or take. It's a large, on wheels, Pentium Pro machine. We had a couple of them at another job. They ran NT 4, SNA Server, etc.
Also, please keep your eyes open for a bunch of Digital servers in the HX series. Intel machines. Yet more personal experience with those.
Enjoy your videos. Cheers!
I'm pretty sure I know exactly which server body you're talking about and it's one of the few time my dad told me "no" on bringing a system home that was on the side of the road.
@@Butterscott_NJ Ah. Hey look out for an HP Kayak minitower system, if you ever come across one.
I seem to remember there was an adapter cable that split to twin VGA output from that socket on some Matrox Cards. giving 3x VGA sockets.
There he is
yay youre back!!!!
This will make an excellent donor for parts to rescue other machines that don't suffer from proprietar-itis. Fireball gonna fireball.
Also... you're into cars? MikeCar channel in the works???
Now I feel like a cookie!
i got some files off a pc from 1998 that my grandparents had. Connected the drive to my pc and the thing did not want to work. I banged it around a bunch and got one read of the files. You can tell i'm missing all of the system files and everything but I got the documents folder and that is all I needed. There is something oddly eerie about dying hard drives to me. I wish I had more time to explore it, but now whenever I get it to register on my pc at all it crashes windows entirely. It is dead dead.
That's a weird NIC. I worked in IT in the 90s (and for more than 20 years after) and I've never seen that.
There's an HDD testing tool called MHDD which tests hard drives for bad sectors. It can give you a good look in the drive's health.
A comically sized lock requires a comically sized key!
I'll be making those cookies for sure
That must be the biggest lock I have ever seen.
I have not seen one in a few years and the last one came in was beat up desktop. The keyboard for those if they still mfg. that style was really retro with hp logo and red keys. As for usb. The reason many don't remember it was really wasn't use until windows 98. Even though they did have windows 95 usb edition Several devices required Windows 98. Plus several boards had headers but no connectors. compared to say I think All PII machines. To many years ago.
I well remember those crunchy Fireball drives. Sounded like paper tearing. They were fine in my experience. I wonder if this machine has an administrative LAN connection for remote maintenance?
Jawbreaker is available for download and works in windows 10!
That Disney program was actually pretty good. Whoever had it. Did the etch picture of the family very well. One day. You'll have to go into the temporary internet files. You may end up blurring half the video. I never needed Napster. When there was a copy saved in my temp internet files of music I liked. I noticed you changed shirts somewhere while making the video. What did I miss?
Granny's cookies will be MINE!
I wanted to say as a joke that Mike didn't save the choc chip recipe, unsub. But the madman actually did it. Fine video as always.
I had the same video card for years and years, with a 4mb expension card. Matrox Milenium FTW. Voodoo2 SLI 12 mb :D
Did you ever find anything about that NIC? I've never seen that and I was working in IT when the change was happening. I guess there were times when the auto negotiate process wouldn't work right, but you could just set what you wanted with a utility.
Sadly I wasn't able to dive deeper into it. Would have been cool to connect it to something running Cisco IOS and see what each port negotiates.
0:50 lol not to worry that would jiggle open with no effort
that is a pretty neat find. even tho i was a bit disappointined. seeing it be a vectra with that case i was expecting it to be a pentium pro. but seems like hp also used the same cases for socket 7. would be even more cool if they had used a quantum big foot drive in it
Cookies accepted!
you gotta do a ddrescue before booting that drive
The man in the wallpaper reminds me of Edward Snowden. And the power LED looks like HAL 9000.
Leave it up to HP to redesign EVERYTHING that is otherwise commonplace! No wonder they eventually bought Compaq too, two peas in a pod. My HP Vectra QS/16S 80386-16 system had a CPU card that plugged into the motherboard. I wonder how many other HP Vectras used these unconventional motherboards and power supplies.
Easy to have survivorship bias with hard drives. As you said those that would fail have already failed, and I believe there's good number of short lived HDDs against every surviving one. the ratio would be the truth to the matter, though that's impossible to determine.
Brandon bishop has one also
Strongly suspect the page fault errors were caused by a bad memory module. try running memtest on the modules indivicually.
The port on the video card looks like a Mac display connector to me
Just curious why did you not post for so long not trying to be rude
Unfortunately pretty much all Quantum Fireballs are dying or dead. There’s a rubber piece as part of the head mechanism that turns to goo. Best case, it’s still solid enough that it just struggles a bit. Worst case, you get a head crash. It sucks, kinda made extra bad because Apple were a big user of them (and I’m sad I’ll never be able to recover my childhood Pentium Win98 install because of it), but at least yours seems to be hanging in there.
The WordPad crash was in the Word document converter module, maybe that dll or the doc itself is corrupt. Proper Office/LibreOffice have always been a lot better than WordPad at handling corrupt files.
I really hope you're somehow able to recover that chocolate chip cookie recipe and then make the cookies and then send them to me 🙂
Edit at the end of viewing: one step down, two to go!
Don't know, I'm pretty bad at baking. Whenever I try to bake any confectionary, they always come out as steaks.
@miketech1024 that sounds like culinary alchemy and I'd expect nothing less from you.
Keep resurrecting them
Yuck-I would use butter over margarine.
These old PCs have had their day, and where do you still need them?
I was interested right up until the goofy proprietary power connector...
why is it upside down... i don't like that its upside down
those files dated 31/12/79 xD
@@Drago1995 LOL how did I not notice that?
@@miketech1024 usually its's 1969 or 1970 xD
Thats the epoch date for the FAT file system, well actually its 1/1/1980, but it becomes 1979 with an American time zone that is behind GMT.
That granny file contains a virus.
6 hour gang 👇
Needs a k6-2(+) 400 cpu
Opel Vectra 👎
Hp vectra 💪
Argh stop saying 'unconnect' it's not even a real word! The word you should be using is 'disconnect'. Sorry to be that guy.
Try Googling the word “joke.” It will help your life substantially
Also, if you have to use the phrase “sorry to be that guy” it means whatever you just said or are about to say just shouldn’t be said.
It is a real word.. so is unconnected, also Mike says a lot of things ironically for fun so you need to relax.
Don't be sorry, just stop doing it.
its just mikes schtik, he says stuff people usually wouldnt: a la de-dusting, unconnect, whatnot
I will never not brutalize the English language!
so hp is capable of making a good computer. but theyre still sticking to the old proprietary connectors, sad to see lol.